


5 A.M.

by kateyes224



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s04e20 Small Potatoes, F/M, Post-Episode: s07e17 All Things, Post-Episode: s09e20 The Truth (Part 2), Pre-Deep Throat, Pre-pilot, The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 13:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13249248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateyes224/pseuds/kateyes224
Summary: Five times Scully found herself awake at 5 a.m., and the one time she wasn’t alone.Inspired loosely by the song of the same name by Amber Run.





	5 A.M.

Watching the glowing red minutes silently slide from 4:32 into 4:33, Dana sighs and finally gives up on sleep.

She throws the thin blue comforter from her body and shivers as the chill of her room lights a signalfire of goosebumps over her bare skin. 

In the dark, she pulls on a pair of sweatpants, tugs her oversized University of Maryland sweatshirt on over her sports bra, and slips her feet into her crosstrainers. She is careful to move as silently as possible, so as not to wake her sleeping roommate.

Dana scuffles from her bedroom into the tiny dual-sink bathroom adjacent to her dorm with her shoelaces still untied and her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. Leaving the light off, she brushes her teeth in the dark and spits the foam of her toothpaste into the sink, swiping a band for her hair from the top drawer.

Pulling it into a ponytail, Dana catches sight of the ghost of herself in the mirror as she passes and she pauses, momentarily caught off guard. She’s still getting used to the darker auburn she’d decided wouldn’t be as attention-grabbing as the fiery copper of her natural color. In the limpid orange light that filters in through the window of the bathroom she now shares with three other recruits, it looks much darker than she’d imagined. She purses her lips at her reflection and turns away.

The door of her dorm snicks shut behind her and she opts to duck down the stairwell rather than take the elevator. Her sneakers squeak and echo above and below her, syncopating with her quickly accelerating heart rate.

Five floors later, Dana pushes the bar on the double doors, throwing her slight weight into them, and the building heaves her into the blue-black chill of predawn. The pavement is almost icy, still wet from the rain the night before, and she breathes the smell of damp concrete and late autumn crispness deep into her lungs as she stretches, pulling the sleep from her limbs.

She turns away from the building that is to be her home for the next 21 weeks and walks briskly towards the track a few hundred yards behind the dorms. The toes of her sneakers dampen as she traipses through the grass, and by the time she reaches the dirt her socks are squelching in her shoes. 

Dana starts out at a slow jog, timing her footfalls with her breathing. She’s decided she’s only doing a mile and half this morning, just enough to get her blood and adrenaline flowing.

Today is the second day of the FBI academy. She’d moved into her dorm yesterday, exchanging tentative smiles and backstories with her new roommate, Analisa Cervantes. Ana had been a cop for almost ten years in Miami when she’d decided the FBI was the right move for her. Dana had tried not to be intimidated by Ana’s war stories of drug deals gone wrong and shootouts with cartel foot soldiers.

Ana’s dark eyebrows had skyrocketed when Dana had described her own previous experience. “Meat wagon brigade, huh?” Remembering the way Ana had chuckled with a shake of her head, her dark curls bouncing around her face, Dana picks up the pace.

Before long she’s sucking air and her lungs are burning.

Rounding her fourth lap, Dana grits her teeth and pushes away the memory of Ana’s polite but obvious incredulity. Dana knows she’s only considered part of the clean-up crew by her roommate and the other law enforcement officers like her. She shows up only when the danger has passed and the scene has long since been secured. While her fellow recruits may have been harvested from agencies around the country, gifted with brawn and the advantage of time on the street, Dana hopes what she lacks in experience and physical strength she more than makes up for in brains and brute determination.

So here she is. She pumps her legs harder as she rounds a turn and completes her first mile, her breath fogging in front of her on each exhale.

In the east, the pale coral of morning is slowly leeching the ink of night from the sky. Red skies in the morning. A bad omen, she thinks, if she believed in those kinds of things. Dana slows for a moment, captivated by the raw glory of daybreak when her breath hitches, a sudden stitch piercing between her third and fourth ribs on her fifth lap.

The pain subsides as she comes to a stop and bends over. Dana stretches for her toes, her body thrumming. She decides to head back and shower, not wanting to overexert herself on her first official day of training.

She takes the elevator up this time, punching the button for the fifth floor. When she steps off and pulls out the key to her dorm, she can hear the other women bumping around in their rooms, readying themselves for the day.

A thrill rushes through her, and she feels a sudden sense of kinship with and pride in the women behind these doors: Women who are brave enough to pit themselves against men two and three times their size; women who are going to hold themselves to the same standard of excellence that their male counterparts hold themselves to; women who, because of their sex, are going to find themselves already at a disadvantage, outnumbered and underestimated, in the competitive boys’ club of an elite federal law enforcement agency.

Dana guesses that Ana is in the shower as she pushes into their dorm and collapses on her bed, her room empty and Ana’s sheets already tucked in with military precision.

Groaning, Dana glances at the clock on her desk and notices that the red light on her phone is blinking, indicating a voicemail.

Dana’s brow wrinkles as she reaches for the phone, still prone on her bed, dialing in the passcode she set up just yesterday. Who would have called so early and then taken the time to leave a message? Hardly anyone knows she’s here.

The automated voice delivering the date and time of the call, which was left just after 5:00 a.m. this morning, pauses before the silence gives way to a deep baritone that stills the blood in Dana’s veins. She immediately sits up, her back ramrod straight.

“Dana…it’s your father. I know that today is a big day for you and…” Ahab pauses, “And…I just wanted you to know that I’ll be praying for you. Make me proud, Starbuck.”

Dana’s breath snags in her chest as the call ends abruptly, and the automated system takes over, telling her to press 7 to repeat the message, 8 to save, or 9 to erase. A flare of anger nearly causes her to slam the phone back down as she stares at the numbers on the keypad.

So typical of her father, to sweep in and demand excellence while maintaining his distance. And this after he’d made it abundantly clear that he was less than thrilled with her decision to join the FBI, told her in no uncertain terms that she was going to be wasting both her talents and his hard-earned money.

_Are you still there?_ The automated system prompts her again to make a decision.

Her finger hovers over the ‘9’ button before she sighs. She hits the ‘7’ and listens to the message again. And again.

Make him proud, he demands. Make me proud.

Dana is about to push the ‘8’ to save the message when Ana comes back into their room with a towel wrapped around her lithe, dark body. She throws a huge, toothy smile at Dana.

“So, Dana, you ready to make these fuckers our bitches today or what?”

Dana stares at the phone a few seconds longer before she glances up at her roommate. She wants to do this. She is going to do this. But not to prove anything to Ahab.

She needs to do this for herself.

Hitting the ‘9’ without any more hesitation, Dana places the phone back in its cradle. She grabs her own towel and toiletry bag and ducks into the still-steamy bathroom, throwing a smile over her shoulder.

“Ana…those boys aren’t gonna know what hit em.”

xxx

A sharp, insistent rap ricochets through the early morning silence in her apartment.

She’d have been startled, had she not been expecting him.

Scully bends to grab her overnight bag from where it’s waiting near her front door, hoisting it over her shoulder and grabbing for the handle at the same time.

When the door swings open, she’s staring awkwardly up at her partner and blinking into the harsh light of her hallway.

“Mornin’, Scully!”

She grimaces, stifling the urge to shush him before stepping out and turning to lock her door. “You are far too chipper for 5 a.m., Mulder,” she says, half-whispering.

From behind his back, Mulder procures a styrofoam cup of coffee and a white pastry bag and holds both out to her. “Well, you know what they say. The early bird gets the worm.”

Scully double-checks her front door to make sure it’s locked and reaches to take the coffee, shaking her head at the proffered food. “You know, that saying was debunked in a recent study out of Britain. Scientists fitted more than a thousand birds with tracking devices and found that while many birds were, in fact, early risers, they were more likely to eat in the afternoon so as to avoid predation. The earlier they ate, the slower they were, and therefore the more vulnerable.”

During her screed, Mulder is nodding silently, reaching into the bag and ripping the entire top of a chocolate chip banana muffin off before devouring half of it in one bite. 

“And while the early bird may indeed eventually get the worm, what about the poor early worm?” Scully continues. The ghost of a smile softens Mulder’s face around his bulging cheek as he takes her overnight bag from her and follows her back down the hall towards her building’s front door. “We never hear about him, do we? He’s just going about his wormy business, trying to get his wormy errands done early, and some jerk with an alarm clock comes along and ruins his day.”

Scully takes a tentative sip from the plastic lid as Mulder holds the front door open for her, and she ducks under his long arm. “Mmm, Mulder, you nailed it. How’d you know how I take my coffee?”

“I pay attention,” he mumbles around his next bite of muffin top.

It’s been three months. Three months since their fledgling case in Bellefleur, Oregon, since they’d stood laughing like idiots in a graveyard in the rain.

She has to admit, this assignment has been a lot more challenging than anything she’s ever done in her life. With each new case she finds herself slipping further down the rabbit hole, wrapped up completely in Mulder’s strange world. He is her beguiling and begrudging tour guide, dispensing morsels of information like breadcrumbs, leading her ever deeper into the darkness he’s been exploring on his own for some time.

To his credit, he hasn’t seemed to mind the company.

Mulder loads her luggage into the back of his sedan and opens her car door for her. It’s late summer, but the bite in the early morning air is enough to make Scully’s teeth chatter, and she glances back over her shoulder at her building, wondering if she should run back for her heavier trenchcoat.

Before she has time to talk herself into it, Mulder shrugs off his suit jacket and drapes it over her shoulders. Instantly, the cold is shuttered by the fine wool of his coat. A smaller, warmer fire ignites just as suddenly, low in her belly, when she’s surrounded by the sharp, clean smell of him.

She douses that feeling quickly. There be monsters, she warns herself, and she purses her lips at him and moves to hand it back to him. “Mulder, no. I’m fine.”

“You’re shivering.”

“I’ll _be_ fine.”

He backs away and walks around to the driver’s side of the car. “I know you will be. Until you are, just wear it.”

Huffing, Scully ducks into the passenger seat and slams the door, letting the bright curtain of her hair obscure the ridiculous blush that she feels rising in her cheeks. Mulder, oblivious, throws the pastry bag onto the floorboard near her feet and starts the car, pulling away from the curb and out onto the empty street.

“Do I get to wear your class ring, too?” Scully asks, hoping the slight waver in her voice isn’t going to give her away. Mulder quirks a smile that Scully returns. She avoids the playful light in his eyes by immediately rooting around for the bag and pulling out the bottom half of the muffin, still wrapped in waxy paper.

Scully rolls her eyes dramatically as she unwraps what’s left, nibbling with exaggerated care at the muffin’s remnants.

Despite the air of constant exasperation she puts on with him, she is still admittedly somewhat starstruck by Spooky Mulder, the myth of him having not quite been rubbed away by her burgeoning familiarity with the man beneath.

But there are moments. Moments when his humanity, his fallibility, shows through. He eats the tops off of muffins and leaves the ass-ends for her. Heathen.

At a red light, Mulder fiddles with the radio dials until he stumbles onto an AM station that will give him a traffic report and he glances at her sidelong.

“Consider yourself pinned, Agent Scully,” Mulder says, watching as she finishes up the ass-end of his muffin.

Their eyes lock and she freezes when he reaches out with his index finger for her lip, carefully dusting away a stray muffin crumb that’s stuck in her lipstick.

Scully clears her throat. “Thanks.”

He shrugs, bringing his eyes back to the road as the light turns green and he sips from his own coffee. “Go back to sleep, I’ll wake you when we’re outside of Boston.”

Scully tries not to make a show of snuggling deeper into the fabric of his coat.

Soon, the sound of the tires on the pavement, the drone of the day’s news, and the jostle of Mulder’s car pull her quietly back into sleep.

+++

There are two states of her being, of late.

Scully is either so exhausted that she can barely keep her eyes open, or she’s so far beyond fatigued that she’s wide awake, haunted by the things she’ll never get to see or do or accomplish.

Tonight, she’s been tossing and turning so long that she’s almost certain she will never be able to untangle her legs from her sheets. Rolling over for what feels like the thousandth time, she wonders whether sleep may very well elude her for the rest of whatever’s left of her life.

She finally gives up just before 5 a.m., kicking her legs free with a frustrated groan. She wraps her softest robe around herself and traipses out to the kitchen to put a kettle on.

The ritual of twilight tea has lately become an unlikely source of comfort for her during the early morning hours, warming her from the inside out as it laps at all the icy places inside her.

That’s another thing. She can’t ever seem to get warm.

Scully stares at the clock on the wall and blinks back the tears that threaten anytime she gives herself more than a few seconds to sit still. The second hand winds its way around and around the face of her kitchen clock. She follows it and waits for the kettle to sing.

By the time it starts to bubble and shriek, Scully exhales and counts herself lucky.

She’s lived another six minutes.

Her Irish breakfast tea is steeping when she shuffles over to her couch, settling in and throwing an afghan over her legs.

The same striped couch where just last week Eddie Van Blundht almost had Mulder’s way with her.

Pushing that depressing thought and all of its myriad implications aside, Scully stares at the black screen of her television for several long moments before she realizes with a sigh that her remote is…all the way over there. Across the room. An insurmountable distance, and all she wants to do is curl into a ball and fade away.

She has just about talked herself into getting up and crossing the room to pick the remote up when her home phone startles her, her tea sloshing over the side of her mug.

Luckily, her cordless is right next to her. Unlike her traitor of a remote.

“Hello?”

“Scully, hey. Did I wake you?”

Mulder. “No, you didn’t.”

A heavy beat of silence, giving Scully another few moments to curse her remote as she swipes with her tongue at the rim of her mug to lap up the spilt drops of tea before they fall. The ceramic lip of it is screaming hot and she winces as her tongue registers the singe a split second too late.

“Why not? It’s not even five yet.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” Scully snaps, and she is almost sorry at the bitterness in her voice, if she had the energy to feel things like regret anymore. “And since when do you care what time it is? You usually have no trouble dragging me out of bed at all hours, Mulder.”

Silence.

Scully sips angrily at her too-hot tea, scalding her mouth as she waits him out.

Jesus, the things he doesn’t say could fill volumes these days.

Doesn’t he realize she’s running out of time?

Finally, he clears his throat.

“Yeah, Scully…About that. I’m sorry.”

Oh, no.

“You’re sorry?”

Please, Mulder. Don’t do this.

“For, uh…for taking up so much of your time.”

Scully sighs. Please not now, she thinks. Not this early in the morning. Not ever. She regrets ever giving form to the idea that her time left is finite. She forgets how clairvoyant he can be, especially when it comes to her.

She mentally sends him an image of herself hoisting him off the cross he’s nailed himself to and kicking his sorry ass. Wishes she had the strength to actually do it.

As it is, the remote is still so very far away.

And she’s tired. She’s so tired of his bullshit martyr complex. Especially when none of this is his fault. She barely has the energy to blame the circumstances that led her to this point, or to blame fate, or God. Let alone him.

She sighs again, glancing at the clock on her VCR. “This isn’t a nine to five job, Mulder. I knew that when I joined the Bureau.”

“Yeah, but…it could have been. It should have been. It should have been a little bit more forgiving,” he murmurs. I should have been a little bit more forgiving, he doesn’t say. His voice is gravel and silk, the riverwater over stones tone that he slips into whenever he’s contemplating the mysteries of the universe.

Scully thinks, morbidly, that he only sounds like that now because he’s realized that she’ll probably die before he has a chance to untangle her. She’ll be the one mystery of his life that will remain unsolved.

She sucks in a breath and holds it, feeling how tired she is in every cell of her being. God, but she is tired. World-weary. She could fall asleep right here, tucked into the corner of her couch, and never wake up again.

“What do you want, Mulder?”

“Oh, right. The, uh…the tox results came back from our latest victim and I wanted to go over them with you.”

“And that couldn’t have waited until 8 a.m., when I’ll see you at the office?”

More silence.

“Mulder? You there?”

“Yeah, yeah. No, that’s fine. You’re right. Of course. I’m sorry, I’ll just see you at the office in a few hours, then?”

The desperation that thickens his voice, the unspoken questions that thread through and between his actual question, they’re almost enough to break her heart.

Oh.

How much longer do they have before he can’t just call her at any hour to talk about toxicology results? Before there won’t be another 8 a.m. “Mornin’, Scully,” as he tosses a file at her and they’re off chasing after the next mystery?

Oh.

“No, Mulder. It’s okay. I’m up anyway. Tell me about the tox results. Anything interesting?” Scully asks, tucking herself into an even tighter ball in the corner of her couch and covering her toes with the afghan.

Mulder is quiet for only a moment. But it’s a long enough moment, and she knows him well enough, that she can actually see him close him eyes in gratitude, sending up a silent prayer to whatever deity he still thinks might be listening that she even picked up the phone in the first place.

“Yeah, so I think there’s something there. Instead of methadone, like the local PD suspected, the results showed that our UNSUB was taking quetiapine, which is commonly prescribed for-”

“Bipolar disorder. Mulder, that’s huge, that means there’s a good chance the victim’s brother may have been involved.”

“I know, exactly as I’d suspected,” he responds, excitement creeping into his voice.

Scully smiles softly, sips her tea and listens to him as his mind unspools, as he makes more of those intuitive leaps and bounds he’s always been inexplicably capable of making. And she wonders just how much harder this is going to be for him without her.

Sadly, she forgives him again for his presumption, for calling her so early, for all of it.

Because she knows that he’s been wondering the same thing.

xxx

She is trying not to feel guilty.

This isn’t the first time they’ve had sex. It’s not even their second time.

It’s their fourth, not that she’s counting. If that time he went down on her in their office after hours last week counts.

But this is the first time they’ve come close to waking up together.

Scully had jolted awake with a gasp just after 4:45 a.m., Mulder’s arm heavy and slung across her waist, anchoring her to his bed. She’d been sticky with sweat, the heat radiating off of his body nearly scorching her.

As she’d laid there, trying to regain control of her galloping heart rate by breathing deeply, she’d thought of the proverbial frog in a pot of gradually warming water, how it doesn’t even realize it’s being boiled alive until it’s far too late. 

And she’d had to get out of there.

So she’d bolted. She’d dressed as quickly and quietly as possible, stealing out of his room like a thief, glad for once of the white noise of his apartment that camouflaged her hasty exit: The bathroom faucet’s endless dripping, the burbling hum of his fish tank, the rain that started to fall outside.

She’d just finished buttoning up her coat when she threw a glance at him just laying there, long limbs askew at ridiculous, coltish angles.

His gorgeous, pouty lower lip was even poutier in sleep. He’d continued to snore softly.

Dammit.

She couldn’t just leave him. Not like this. Not after last night. Not when they’d come this close to actually waking up together in the same bed. It’s just not right.

That’s the guilty refrain that’s coursing through her now as she scrounges silently through his kitchen to find a leftover napkin from last night’s takeout. She fishes a pen from her purse.

_M,_

__

__

_Had to run home and change. See you at work._

Her pen pauses above the napkin. She agonizes for a brief moment.

What is the protocol here? How does convention dictate that she close this brief little lovenote to her partner and best friend cum lover?

_“Love, Dana”? Love?_ Love. She does love him, but Jesus, she doesn’t want the first time she expresses it to him to be on a takeout napkin from Thai Time.

_“Xo, Dana”?_

She winces. He’d think she’d been replaced by a shapeshifter. No, to him she is Scully, and to her he is Mulder, and to try and shoehorn their first names into this fledgeling relationship is a mistake. It reeks of trying too hard.

Convention never did become them, anyway.

She contemplates, pen pressed into the plump center of her bottom lip.

“Going somewhere?”

She jumps, dropping the pen on the counter. “Jesus, Mulder.” The napkin flutters to the floor.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” His sleep-scratchy voice hangs in the air between them, weighed down by all the possible meanings behind his words.

Scully stoops quickly to pick up the pen and the napkin and glances up as he crosses his arms and leans against the door frame. He’s put pajama pants back on, thank God, but they’re the pale yellow pair that she outwardly makes fun of and secretly loves. They make his skin glow like he’s just spent the weekend in the Caribbean instead of the United Kingdom.

Her eyes rake over him once, long enough for him to smirk at her in spite of a schoolboy blush that rises in his cheeks.

“You didn’t scare me,” Scully protests. “I was just…I was going to head home to change and I didn’t want you to think that I’d left just to, uh, avoid…you know…” Scully licks her lips and glances up at him.

She trails off, twisting the napkin and fiddling with the pen cap. She’s a terrible liar.

And it’s been so long since she’s done this. 

As her heartrate doubles, Scully stifles a ridiculous urge to cry for help.

Mulder blinks back at her languidly, his eyebrows lifting in invitation for her to continue digging her own grave, apparently happy to watch her flounder.

Scully purses her lips and rocks back on her heels, immediately defensive. Fine. If this is the game he’s going to play.

“Mulder, we have work tomorrow.”

“You mean today.”

She glares. “Yes, today. You know what I meant. I can’t very well show up in yesterday’s suit. It’s…it’s wrinkled.”

Mulder nods, and this time he’s the one giving her a once-over, slow enough that she starts to fidget again. “You look fine to me.”

“Mulder…”

“Scully.”

He’s really not going to give her an inch. Okay.

Okay.

She can do this. She takes a deep breath. “Look, I still, uh…I need a little bit of time to get used to,” she gestures between the two of them, “this. Whatever _this_ is.”

A split-second flicker of doubt darkens his eyes. “And what, exactly, do you think this is, Scully?”

She shrugs a shoulder, twirls the pen between her fingers. “I’ve never been good at this part, Mulder.”

Mulder chews on his lower lip for a long moment, contemplative. A car alarm starts screaming down the street before its owner chirps it off.

He clears his throat. “What part are we at, Scully?”

A sudden but distinct shift happens in the space that those words take up between them.

Scully finds herself in the unlikely position of being the one person in the room who’s certain of the way the other one feels.

It’s a heady feeling, she realizes, to be the one wielding all the power, as Mulder now starts fidgeting and shuffling one bare foot back and forth.

Well, in for a penny.

“I was debating whether or not to write ‘Love, Dana’ on this napkin,” she says, setting it and the pen down by her purse on kitchen counter.

Mulder’s head snaps up. His eyes soften as he smiles, incredulous.

“‘Love’? That sounds pretty serious.”

“It is pretty serious.”

Mulder nods slowly. He takes a step into the kitchen. “Well, _Dana_ , you, uh…you better go home and change then. I guess I’ll see you at the office.”

Scully blinks up at him through lowered lashes, grateful. She closes the distance between them by half.

“I do, you know.”

He steps forward again. Even with his bare feet and her heels on, he towers over.

“You do, what?” he breathes.

He’s insufferable when he’s like this, when he wants her to admit that he’s been right all along, while she’s been waiting for the evidence to pan out.

But they’ve always done their best work when they met in the middle. Even if he had to push her to get her to meet him halfway.

She looks up at him and takes a breath.

In for a pound. “I love you.”

His eyes search hers as his hands reach for hers, twining their fingers together.

“You okay with that?” he asks. He’s so earnest it makes her heart break.

She pretends to think hard for a moment, and he cracks a smile, chuckling softly.

Scully sobers. “I will be. Thank you for giving me some time.”

His face descends and she rises on her tiptoes. The kiss is chaste and lovely and he pulls away much too soon. With his forehead pressed against hers, he whispers, “Get outta here. I’ll see you at the office in a few hours.”

Scully turns to go, gathering up her belongings. Before she leaves, she uncaps the pen still next to her purse, scribbles something on the napkin, and presses it into his palm as she kisses his cheek.

His front door has just shut behind her when he finally glances down at the napkin.

_“Forever yours,”_ it reads.

Mulder smiles.

xxx

It is 4:47 a.m. They’ve made it exactly 270.8 miles before Mulder pulls into the vacant parking lot of a small church off of Interstate 81, just west of Wytheville.

Bethlehem Lutheran is a quaint clump of brick buildings bathed orange in the glow of a few sentry streetlamps. Scully chuckles darkly, and Mulder spares a glance over at her as he navigates the car.

Bethlehem. How very fitting.

It’s enough to make her want to eat a bullet.

They are not seeking refuge as anxious parents-to-be of the future savior of the world. There may well be an inn, later, eventually, whenever they get wherever it is they’re going. They won’t be turned away unless the FBI has put out a BOLO with their names and faces attached.

Even if they were relegated to a stable, she is not swollen with child. There is no baby to be had here. Her womb is woefully, desperately empty.

That ship, such as it was, has sailed.

Scully’s heart clenches painfully as she carries the metaphor even further.

Their three wise men will not be coming; they are dead and buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She should probably tell Mulder. He’d made mention of trying to call them when they’d first jumped on the 95 South and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him, then.

Dawn is still an hour or more off. Mulder pulls into a darkened corner of the parking lot, hidden from view of the highway by a long row of hedges, and throws the SUV into park.

He’d stripped off his hideous orange jumpsuit a hundred miles ago, shedding it in the backseat and then ditching it in a dumpster behind a gas station in Lexington. Scully had ducked into a 24-hour Walmart across the street and paid cash for a three-pack of Hanes t-shirts and a pair of Levis while he’d waited outside in the car.

Scully had taken a moment to relieve her bladder in the filthy bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. Graffiti had been etched into the walls of the stalls behind her, crudely explicit scrawlings of the random pair of tits or an ejaculating penis, backwards curses she’d read in the mirror over her shoulder.

Scully had nearly vomited, staring at a reflection she scarcely recognized, and dizzy from the combination of fear and exhaustion and freneticism that had marked the last few weeks of her life.

She’d allowed herself to wonder in that moment, as she swayed unsteadily under the fluorescent lights, what the hell she was thinking, following him into the unknown yet again, fleeing her life, her family, her career. She’s an FBI agent and lapsed Catholic; this self-imposed exile and excommunication will mean she’s damned on all counts, in this life and the next.

Maybe it was always going to come to this. Their ferocious devotion to one another to the exclusion of all else, beyond reason or sanity, it was always going to be what did them in.

Scully’s bloodshot eyes had come to rest on a deeply etched “John 8:32” in the mirror just above her head. The glass was warped and bent beneath the graffiti, as if the person responsible had carved it using every ounce of their strength.

It’s a verse Scully knows well, one of Mulder’s favorites. He’d parroted it back to her ad nauseum over the last decade, his voice sometimes dripping with sarcasm and sometimes tenderly reassuring:

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

The echo of that verse throbs in Scully’s veins now as Mulder turns the keys in the ignition and kills the engine.

Scully’s jaw muscles work as she feels him study her. The air between them is thick, and getting heavier by the minute the longer they allow words to go unspoken.

Their daguerreotyped profiles are a study in shadow and ambient streetlight.

She still hasn’t looked at him.

She knows what he wants to ask. Prays he won’t ask it.

But Mulder never could leave his scabs alone. Or hers.

“Scully.” She flinches at the sadness that cracks his voice, at the pity. It’s not what she wants. It’s never been what she wants.

He sighs heavily.

“Scully, we should probably talk about Willia-”

She’s launched herself at him, navigating her body over the center console before he can finish his sentence. Her mouth is plundering his, shutting him up, stealing all the questions from his lips before he has a chance to ask them.

And he, damn him, he eagerly forgets them, whatever he’d been hoping she might answer. She can’t remember his nimble fingers working the buttons of her top free of their moorings, but he must have done because before she knows it her blouse is gone, pushed off of her shoulders and he’s face to face with her breasts, almost a full cup size larger than he probably remembers.

In the dark, he struggles with a nonexistent front-clasp, then reaches around and finds wide straps equipped with far more hooks than her old bras ever had.

Scully grunts, frustrated. She pulls his hands back up and around to feel by Braille that there are clasps further up, on either front bra strap, that he can open.

Realization must hit him, because he pulls his hands back like he’s touched fire.

She’s wearing a nursing bra. It’s all she’d had left that still fit her engorged breasts comfortably. They’re leaking now, after he’s thumbed them into painfully hard peaks, the sweet smell of breastmilk soaking into the thick cotton material and leaving two dark spots where her nipples are.

It’s been two weeks. Two weeks since she gave her son up. She’s read that it can take that long for her milk to dry up.

Scully grinds down on Mulder to distract him, hoping she’s hurting him. She sees stars when the hard length of him hits her in exactly the right spot as she shamelessly ruts on him through their jeans.

He’s trying like hell to capture her mouth with his own but she keeps turning her head away.

Scully keeps her eyes squeezed shut. She still can’t look at him, hasn’t looked at him for a hundred miles. Not when it’s all she can do not to see William’s heavy-lidded gaze in his father’s face.

Goddammit, she thinks, and she nearly sobs as he takes one of her nipples into his mouth and sucks. She’d been so close to having them both.

If only she’d held on, just a few weeks longer.

Mulder works himself free of his jeans and his boxers. He struggles with the button and zipper on her pants and somehow manages to push them down past her knees.

Why couldn’t she just hold on? Why?

The head of Mulder’s penis nudges her opening, already slick with her arousal.

She should have held on.

He sheathes himself within the tight clench of her body and they both gasp. One of them whimpers.

God, it’s been so long.

Scully can’t move. She’s paralyzed above him, lets him shift beneath her, throws her head back as his hips roll.

Two weeks. She gave him up just two weeks ago.

Mulder’s fingers wrap around her slender hips and he pulls her roughly against him on each upward thrust. The jarring contact with his pelvic bone is just this side of painful.

She couldn’t have waited two weeks?

Mulder jams a hand down between them and starts to circle her clit with his thumb.

Why didn’t she hold on?

“Let go,” Mulder rasps in her ear, sensing her distance, nipping at the pulsepoint of her neck.

_Hold on_ , her heart whispers traitorously.

“Scully, just let go.”

_You should have held on._

It’s too much. Everything about what her life has become, is about to be, is too much. Her orgasm, which seconds before had seemed imminent, evaporates. Her sobs shatter the humid silence of the cab of the SUV.

Mulder immediately stills, frames her face with his hands. He gathers her into his arms and tucks her under his chin. He somehow manages to slip out of her and get himself tucked back into his jeans as he cradles her in his lap and rocks her gently back and forth.

“It’s okay, Scully,” he soothes, stroking the top of her head and crooning lowly in her ear, “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.”

_You’re here_ , Scully thinks.

_But he’s not._

As she swallows and chokes back another wrack of sobs, her gaze lasers in on the church’s bulletin board, glowing brightly across the parking lot, which heralds the following message, a holdover from Mother’s Day this past Sunday.

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

Scully weeps openly. She doesn’t remember falling into an uneasy sleep, or being gently settled into the passenger seat and buckled in.

Mulder keeps driving.

xxx

She’s forgotten how quiet it can be out here. Nature can be its own kind of riot, especially when their nearest human neighbors are almost two miles away. But as she blinks awake in that heavy, silent space between midnight and morning, she has to strain to hear…anything.

The crickets had stopped chirping hours ago. Bullfrogs haven’t croaked since just after dusk. And it must be too early for the loons and the mourning doves to begin singing from their melancholy repertoires.

Mulder shifts in bed next to her. His snores cease for just a moment before they start up again after he settles.

In the blue-grey light that filters in through the gauzy curtains she’d picked out herself years ago, Scully finally hears a lone whip-poor-will cry out. She pulls the duvet up to her chin and turns into the curve of Mulder’s body, fitting herself into the spaces he’s always seemed to leave for her.

She’d crawled into bed with him last night, skin damp from a shower and long red hair coiled into a bun on the top of her head.

He’d been sat up in bed, the sheet draping his lower body, responding to a text from William. And stark naked.

So was she.

Both of them were giddy, revitalized and drunk on the two bottles of Malbec she’d brought over to celebrate that they’d discovered that their son was alive. And healthy. And normal. Well, as normal as a kid could be with the two of them contributing to his genetic makeup.

She’d climbed into Mulder’s lap, carefully removed his reading glasses and put them on the nightstand. Shaking her head so that her hair tumbled loose from its top-knot, she’d taken his phone from him and thrown it over her shoulder to land behind them somewhere in the pile of blankets at the foot of the bed, and kissed his half-hearted protests away. Kissed him until they were both breathless and shifting their lower bodies more meaningfully, kissed him until his fingers had snagged in her wet, uncombed hair as she sank down on top of him.

“Fuck,” he’d said, through clenched teeth.

“That’s the idea.”

“Your hair.” Mulder tugged his fingers through the tangles, and she’d hummed her appreciation. He’d chuckled. “No, I mean your hair. I’m stuck.”

“Mm. Then I have you right where I want you.”

He’d smiled and pulled down gently as he thrust up. “No kidding.”

They’d been doing this again. Pretending like it wasn’t monumental that she’d been spending more and more time at their house. Steadfastly ignoring how important it was, what it meant that she was making a conscious effort to be caught up in his orbit, instead of resisting the ever-present gravitational pull he had on her.

Just like they had the first time around.

Well, there were a few exceptions. This time, her hair was longer. And they had a son together.

“Do you miss it?” Scully asked.

“Oh, yeah…I’ve missed it.”

Scully slowed the pace she’d set initially, batting Mulder’s hands away when he grabbed for her hips to get her to speed up again.

“No, I mean my shorter hair. How I used to wear it, when we first met. Do you miss it?”

“Oh. That. Yeah, I do, actually,” he’d said, stilling and looking up at her thoughtfully. “I like the long hair, I do. But it reminds me of…darker times, I guess. When it really was just the two of us against the world. You only grew it out like this after we were on the lam.”

Scully had tittered and started moving, rolling over him again and again, relentless as the tide. “Wasn’t exactly like we could stop for a haircut. Or a shave,” she said, stroking his chin.

“You trying to tell me you miss the beard?” Mulder had joked, and she’d laughed as she shook her head.

Mulder grew serious. “You looked so professional and dangerous with that razor-sharp bob, all those years ago. Like you’d fucking kill anyone who looked at you the wrong way and wouldn’t think twice about it. Including me.”

Scully smiled and clenched her inner muscles around him. “I would have.”

“Why do you think it took me seven years to make a move?” he’d responded, his large hands spanning her waist as he’d torqued his hips up.

They hadn’t done a lot of talking after that.

Scully is brought back to the present when Mulder turns towards her, throwing an arm out over her and pulling her closer to him.

She thinks back to a time when this nearness had frightened her. To need someone so much, it had terrified her.

The whip-poor-will calls out again, splitting the silence of the early morning.

How things change, she thinks, and she pulls his arm tighter, linking their fingers.

Whenever Dana had stood at the curb as a girl, sobbing as the Scully family boxed up another one of their many houses, pulling up stakes to move to yet another new place, and she’d cried about leaving their friends and their schools and their lives, her father would kneel down, look her in the eyes and say, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”

As the morning starts to peek in, casting the shadows of their bedroom in shades of lavender, Scully knows now that her father was right. She and Mulder are proof of it.

They are stronger now for all the many places they’ve been broken.

She exhales, and feels a tentative peace she hopes will hold.


End file.
